Why English Clubs Wear Their Colours and Kit Origins

In 1865 a group of men meeting at the Clinton Arms in Nottingham spent some of their new club's first money on a dozen red caps. They had been playing shinty, they had just decided to play football instead, and the colour they picked was the red of Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose redshirts had made him the most fashionable revolutionary in Victorian England. Nottingham Forest have worn that red ever since. Twenty-one years later two former Forest players working at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich wrote to their old club asking for help kitting out a new works side, and Forest sent a set of red shirts and a ball. That side became Arsenal.

Almost every English club's colours have a story of that shape behind them — an accident, a donation, a chapel, a schoolmaster, or a chairman with an idea. Very few were designed. What follows covers how the colours arrived, why particular combinations spread across the country, what made clubs change, and the rules the FA, the Premier League and the EFL apply when two sets of colours meet on a Saturday afternoon and one of them has to give way.

What a club actually had in 1878

Kit, in the first two decades of organised football in England, was not a product. It was clothing. A club forming in a Lancashire mill town in the late 1870s did not order a strip; it told its members to turn up in something similar, and if it had money it bought a set of jerseys from a local outfitter or a general draper who happened to stock them.

That constraint shaped everything that followed. Dyes that were cheap, stable and available in bulk — red, navy, black, white — turn up disproportionately in the colours of clubs founded before 1890. Dyes that were expensive or that ran in the wash do not. It is the least romantic explanation of why so much of English football is played in red and blue, and it is probably the largest single reason.

Distinguishing marks came before uniform colours. In the earliest years clubs frequently wore caps, sashes or striped stockings over otherwise ordinary clothes, because the point was to tell one side from the other rather than to look like a club. Everton spent their first seasons in black shirts with a scarlet sash and were known as the Black Watch for it. Sheffield FC, formed in 1857 and the oldest football club in the world, used caps and colours in the manner of a cricket club, which is what its members were used to.

The Football Association's early rulebook barely addressed appearance at all. It had no interest in what a team wore so long as the game could be played, and the idea of a registered, protected club identity was decades away. Colours became fixed by habit — by a club ordering a second set matching the first, and a third, and then finding that its supporters had started calling it the Reds.

• 1857Sheffield FC founded
• 1865Forest adopt Garibaldi red
• 1961Leeds switch to all-white
• 1964Liverpool switch to all-red

Documented adoption dates for four clubs, chosen as illustrations rather than as a ranked or complete list.

Chapel, school and works: where the shirts came from

Follow the founding of English clubs and you keep arriving at the same four institutions.

Churches and chapels produced an enormous number of them, because a Sunday school or a Bible class was one of the few bodies in a Victorian industrial town that could organise young men, own equipment and book a field. Everton grew out of St Domingo's Methodist chapel in Liverpool. Aston Villa was formed by members of the Villa Cross Wesleyan Chapel in Handsworth. Bolton Wanderers began at Christ Church. Fulham started as a church Sunday school side in west London, Southampton as St Mary's Church Young Men's Association, a lineage still audible in the nickname and visible in the ground's name. Where a chapel side kept playing, it very often kept the chapel's colours, or the colours of the banner it paraded behind.

Workplaces were the second great source. Manchester United began as Newton Heath LYR, the works team of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway's carriage and wagon department, and played in the company's green and gold. Arsenal began among munitions workers at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich. West Ham United grew out of Thames Ironworks, a shipbuilder on the Lea, and still carry crossed rivetting hammers on the badge. Coventry City started as Singers FC, named for the cycle works. Stoke and Crewe Alexandra came out of the railways, as did a dozen sides that did not survive. Works teams frequently borrowed the company's livery, which is how an industrial colour scheme could become a football one.

Public schools and their old boys account for fewer clubs but a distinctive set of colours. Blackburn Rovers were founded in 1875 by former pupils of Shrewsbury School and Malvern College, and the blue and white halves the club has worn for most of its history come out of that schoolboy inheritance rather than anything local to east Lancashire.

Cricket clubs are the fourth route. Sheffield Wednesday began as the football section of a cricket club whose members had Wednesday afternoons off, and took the day as a name. Others followed the same path, arriving with a ground, a committee and sometimes a colour scheme already in place. If you want the full picture of how these bodies turned themselves into football clubs, the companion page on how English football clubs were founded works through it constitution by constitution.

Borrowed, donated and copied

The Forest-to-Arsenal transfer of shirts is the best-known case of a club simply being given its colours, but the mechanism was ordinary. New clubs were poor, established clubs replaced kit periodically, and a crate of last season's jerseys was a genuinely useful gift to send across the country.

Copying was more common still, and it was rarely disguised. Tottenham Hotspur adopted white shirts and navy shorts in 1898 in deliberate imitation of Preston North End, who a decade earlier had gone through a league season unbeaten. Burnley changed to claret and blue in 1910 because Aston Villa were winning everything in claret and blue and the Burnley committee wanted some of that for themselves. Leeds United's switch to all-white under Don Revie in 1961 was an explicit invocation of Real Madrid, then European champions in a way nobody in England could ignore.

The traffic ran outward too. Notts County, the oldest professional club in the world, sent a set of black and white striped shirts to Turin in 1903 at the request of an Englishman connected to a young Italian club. Juventus have worn them since. It is the most consequential parcel in the history of football kit.

Nobody in any of these cases was protecting intellectual property, because there was none to protect. Colours were not registrable, sponsorship did not exist, and replica shirts were not sold to supporters in any volume until the 1970s. Imitation cost nothing and signalled ambition, which is why English football contains clusters of near-identical clubs rather than a tidy spread of distinct ones.

Claret and blue, and how it travelled

Aston Villa settled on claret and blue in the late 1880s. The precise year is argued over and the club's surviving early records are not decisive on it. What is beyond argument is that within a decade Villa were the dominant force in English football, winning the Football League and the FA Cup repeatedly, and that the combination became firmly associated with them.

Burnley's adoption in 1910 is documented and was openly imitative. The club had worn other colours; it changed to Villa's, then won the First Division and the FA Cup in the years either side of the First World War, and has kept claret and blue since.

West Ham's is the story everybody tells and nobody can fully verify. The generally repeated account has a set of Aston Villa shirts reaching the Thames Ironworks club in the 1890s through one of the founding figures, either won in a wager from Villa players or handed over in settlement of a debt after a night out in Birmingham. The versions differ on exactly the details you would expect to have been smoothed by retelling. The shirts arriving is well attested. The wager is folklore.

Scunthorpe United complete the main group. Beyond those four, claret appears in England as a trim rather than as a base colour, partly because it is a difficult shade to hold consistently across a batch of dyed fabric — a practical problem that reappears further down this page under the manufacturers.

Club	Combination	How it arrived
Aston Villa	Claret and blue	Adopted in the late 1880s; exact year disputed
Burnley	Claret and blue	Changed in 1910 in imitation of Villa
West Ham United	Claret and blue	Traced to Villa shirts reaching Thames Ironworks
Scunthorpe United	Claret and blue	Adopted later; the least prominent of the four

Why imitation clustered around Villa and not somebody else

Copying the champions was a general habit, so the question is why claret and blue produced a lasting cluster when other successful clubs' colours did not. The likeliest answer is that Villa's peak coincided with the moment the Football League expanded and the replica-free but strongly identified club shirt became normal, and that claret and blue was distinctive enough to be worth taking. Copying Preston's white, by contrast, gave a club almost nothing, because white was already everywhere; Tottenham took it anyway, and are the exception that shows how weak the signal was. Dozens of clubs in the 1890s and 1900s wore red or navy without anyone claiming they had copied a specific side, because there was no specific side to copy. A rare combination transmits. A common one does not.

The clubs that changed, and what made them

Change usually has one of three causes: a rebrand imposed from above, a merger or refoundation, or a supporter revolt.

Manchester United's is the cleanest example of the first. Newton Heath played in green and gold. When the club was rescued from insolvency, renamed in 1902 and effectively restarted, it took red shirts and white shorts, and the railway colours vanished for the better part of a century — until supporters revived green and gold as protest scarves during a campaign against the club's ownership, which is a rare case of an abandoned kit being repurposed as a political object.

Chelsea's earliest shirts were a pale eton blue taken from the racing colours of the club's first president, Earl Cadogan. They moved to royal blue in 1912, and the lighter shade now surfaces only in heritage kits. Liverpool wore blue and white quarters in their first seasons, the split from Everton having left the new club at Anfield with the old club's discarded kit, before taking red in the 1890s. The all-red change came much later. In 1964 Bill Shankly put his side in red shorts and socks as well as shirts before a European tie, looked at the effect, and kept it.

Crystal Palace's 1973 change is worth pausing on because it took the club's colours, nickname and badge in one move. Out went claret and blue; in came red and blue vertical stripes, and the Eagles replaced the Glaziers. That rebrand is a direct cause of one of the odder rivalries in the English game, set out on the page about the M23 derby between Palace and Brighton.

Cardiff City, a Welsh club playing in the English pyramid, spent three seasons from 2012 in red rather than their historic blue at the instigation of an owner who considered red more marketable overseas. Supporter opposition was sustained, organised and eventually successful, and the club reverted to blue in 2015. It remains the clearest modern demonstration that colours in England are held by the supporters in everything except law.

1. 1Institutional inheritanceThe chapel, school, works department or cricket club that founded the side already had colours, and the football team kept them.
2. 2AvailabilityThe committee bought whatever the local outfitter stocked in bulk, which favoured red, navy, black and white.
3. 3DonationAn established club sent a set of shirts to a new one, as Nottingham Forest did for the Woolwich side that became Arsenal.
4. 4ImitationThe committee copied a successful club, as Burnley copied Aston Villa in 1910 and Leeds copied Real Madrid in 1961.

A classification of documented origins rather than a ranking; many clubs fit more than one route.

Stripes, hoops, halves and quarters

Pattern is the second axis of English kit identity and it obeys different rules from colour. Stripes dominate: Newcastle United, Sunderland, Sheffield United, Sheffield Wednesday, Southampton, West Bromwich Albion, Stoke City, Brighton, and dozens more below them in the pyramid. Part of the reason is mechanical. Vertical stripes were straightforward to knit on the machinery available to Victorian hosiery manufacturers in the Midlands and the north, and they read clearly at distance in the low light of an English November.

Hoops are rarer and are strongly associated with a handful of clubs, Queens Park Rangers, who took blue and white hoops in the mid-1920s, chief among them. Hoops are harder to keep neat as the fabric stretches across a running player, and a hooped shirt is more likely to read confusingly against a striped one at speed. Both facts have kept the pattern uncommon here.

Halves belong to Blackburn Rovers above anyone else, and their survival is a direct consequence of the club's public-school founding rather than of anything local. Quarters are rarest of the four in England. Bristol Rovers are the main exponent, and the pattern has come and gone elsewhere as an occasional heritage gesture rather than as a settled identity.

Why the pattern matters more than the colour on the day

A referee assessing a potential clash is not really assessing colour. He is assessing how fast a player can identify a team-mate in peripheral vision at twenty-five yards with the ball arriving. Two clubs in different shades of blue may be perfectly distinguishable if one wears stripes and the other does not. Two clubs in obviously different colours can be hard to separate if both wear the same pattern at the same width and the floodlights flatten the contrast between them. Sleeve colour and short colour feed into the same judgement, which is why competition rules in England cover shirts, shorts and socks as three separate items, and why a club can be told to change one of them rather than the lot.

Away kits, third kits and the registration rules

The modern system is bureaucratic and worth understanding, because most supporter complaints about kit clashes are aimed at the wrong body.

Clubs in the Premier League and the EFL register their kits with the competition before the season starts, under the rules set out in the relevant handbook and in the FA's Kit and Advertising Regulations. Registration covers home, away and, where used, third kits, plus goalkeeper strips, and it treats shirts, shorts and socks as separate registered items rather than as one object. Changes during the season are restricted.

The third kit exists for one reason. It covers the case where the away kit also clashes. That case arises more often than it sounds, because a club playing in a dark home kit will usually choose a light away kit, and will then find itself at a ground where the home side wear white. Once a competition requires registration in advance, a club needs a third option sitting on the shelf rather than an improvised one on the day.

Goalkeepers are handled under Law 4 and must be distinguishable from both sets of outfield players and from the match officials, which means a keeper's registered colours have to avoid a wider set of collisions than any outfielder's. It is why goalkeeper kits in England drift towards colours nobody else wants — lime, fluorescent orange, dark grey with a pattern printed over it.

Kit	Registered before the season	Primary purpose
Home	Yes	Club identity; worn unless the visitors cannot be distinguished
Away	Yes	Worn by the visiting club when the home kit is too close
Third	Where the club has one	Covers the case where the away kit also clashes
Goalkeeper	Yes, usually more than one set	Must differ from both teams and from the officials

How a clash is resolved on the day

Law 4 of the Laws of the Game, maintained by IFAB, states the principle in a sentence: the two teams must wear colours that distinguish them from each other and from the match officials. It does not say who changes. That is left to competition rules, and in England the answer is consistent across the professional game. The visiting club changes.

In practice the decision is settled well before kick-off. The home club notifies the visitors of the kit it intends to wear, the visitors nominate theirs, and where doubt remains the matter goes to the competition and then to the appointed referee, whose ruling at the ground is final. Referees have the authority to require a change to shorts or socks alone, and they use it, because a shirt clash and a sock clash are different problems with different fixes.

Officials' kit is part of the same calculation. Referees in England wore black almost exclusively until the 1990s, when the professional game moved to green and then to a rotating palette, largely so that officials could get out of the way of a team wearing black or dark grey. A club arriving in an all-black away kit remains a recurring source of late changes.

Colour blindness and contrast

The most significant recent shift in English kit thinking has nothing to do with aesthetics. Roughly one man in twelve has some form of colour vision deficiency, most commonly in the red-green range, and campaigning by the charity Colour Blind Awareness has pushed the FA and the Premier League towards guidance that treats red against green, red against brown and pale blue against grey as clashes in their own right regardless of how different they look to everyone else. The same guidance extends to squad numbers and lettering, where a low-contrast number on a busy shirt is unreadable to a substantial minority of the crowd and, on occasion, to players.

This has firmed up gradually rather than arriving as a single rule on a single date, and the community game and the professional game are not always working to the same version of it. Anyone describing it should say so rather than imply a settled national standard that does not exist.

1. 1RegistrationClubs register home, away, third and goalkeeper kits with the competition before the season begins.
2. 2NotificationThe home club tells the visiting club which kit it intends to wear for the fixture.
3. 3NominationThe visiting club nominates a registered kit, changing if the home kit is too close.
4. 4Referee's callThe appointed referee assesses shirts, shorts and socks at the ground and can require a change to any one element.
5. 5OfficialsThe referee's own colour is chosen last, to stay clear of both teams.

The general sequence used across the professional game in England; the precise wording sits in each competition's own handbook.

Colours as identity on derby day

The rule that the away side changes has a consequence supporters feel keenly. In a local derby the visiting club is frequently required to abandon its own colours in the single fixture where they matter most, because its away kit happens to sit too close to its rival's home kit. Out comes the third strip, which is by definition the one nobody has any attachment to.

Some clubs have gone further and effectively ruled a colour out. It has never been a formal regulation anywhere in England, but there are clubs at which an away or third kit in the neighbour's primary colour would be commercially dead on arrival, and the design departments know it. A red third kit at Everton. A sky blue one at Manchester United. The objection is not aesthetic.

Colour also governs what supporters can wear into a ground. Away supporters in England are segregated, and stewards at most grounds will refuse entry to a home area to anyone in visiting colours, both under the ground regulations displayed at the turnstiles and as a matter of ordinary crowd management. The page on away fan segregation sets out how that operates and why it is a police matter as much as a club one.

The badge is the other half of the identity. Crests carry colour information independent of the shirt, and a club that changes shirt colour has to decide whether the crest follows it. The page on what English football club crests mean picks up the heraldry, the civic borrowings and the municipal arms that ended up on football shirts, and the club nicknames page covers the names that grew out of the colours rather than the other way round.

The manufacturer's hand

Since the 1970s, when clubs began selling replica shirts in volume, the kit has been a product with a supplier, a design cycle and a commercial rationale. That has changed what the colours actually look like.

Manufacturers work from templates. A supplier producing kits for several dozen clubs across Europe designs a small number of shirt bodies each cycle and applies club colours to them, which is why kits from entirely unrelated clubs sharing a supplier can be recognisably the same garment. The club specifies colour. It does not usually specify cut, collar or the placement of the panels.

Shade drifts. A colour specified as a reference number in one fabric will not come out identically in another, and a club changing supplier often finds its red or its claret has moved a step. Supporters notice this far more than the industry expects them to, and clubs with an unusual base colour get more complaints about shade than clubs in primary red or white. The Wolverhampton Wanderers old gold, which derives from the city's coat of arms and the motto about light coming out of darkness, has travelled across a visible range over the decades without the club ever changing its colours.

Then there is sponsorship. A shirt sponsor's own brand colours have to sit on the front legibly, which occasionally pushes a club towards a plainer front panel than its pattern would otherwise have, or towards a slightly different weight of its own colour behind the wordmark. The commercial mechanics of all that are covered on the shirt sponsorship page.

None of this has altered a single club's actual colours. It has altered how consistently those colours appear from year to year, which is a smaller thing that supporters care about disproportionately, and reasonably so — the shade is what they buy.

Where the historic kits are recorded

There is no official national register of English football kits, which surprises people who assume the FA keeps one. What exists instead is a set of overlapping archives, each incomplete in a different way.

The National Football Museum, now in Manchester, holds the largest public collection of English football material, including match-worn shirts and archive holdings relating to the game's governing bodies. Several clubs run museums with kit displays of their own. A number have deposited historical records with local authority archive services, where the shirts sit alongside the minute books that record kit decisions being taken — and the minute book is frequently the only primary evidence for when a club changed colour at all.

Beyond the institutions, the serious documentary work on English kit history has been done by researchers compiling club-by-club illustrated records from photographs, matchday programmes and press reports. Historical Football Kits is the best known of these and functions as the standard reference in practice, though like every such project it is explicit about the points where the evidence runs out.

The gaps are real and they matter. Colour photography arrives late; before it, a kit's shade has to be inferred from a black and white photograph, from a written description in a match report, or from a surviving garment that has faded on a hanger for eighty years. That is exactly why so many adoption dates on this page carry a hedge. Where a club's founding paperwork survives, the story is documented. Where it does not, the story is reconstructed, and the honest position is to say which is which rather than to give every club a tidy origin myth. The oldest football clubs in England page runs into the same evidential problem from the other direction, and the England hub collects the rest of the club-history material alongside the wider football section.